Abstract
This paper argues that biological organisation can be legitimately conceived of as an intrinsically teleological causal regime. The core of the argument consists in establishing a connection between organisation and teleology through the concept of self-determination: biological organisation determines itself in the sense that the effects of its activity contribute to determine its own conditions of existence. We suggest that not any kind of circular regime realises self-determination, which should be specifically understood as self-constraint: in biological systems, in particular, self-constraint takes the form of closure, i.e. a network of mutually dependent constitutive constraints. We then explore the occurrence of intrinsic teleology in the biological domain and beyond. On the one hand, the organisational account might possibly concede that supra-organismal biological systems (as symbioses or ecosystems) could realise closure, and hence be teleological. On the other hand, the realisation of closure beyond the biological realm appears to be highly unlikely. In turn, the occurrence of simpler forms of self-determination remains a controversial issue, in particular with respect to the case of self-organising dissipative systems.
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Notes
It is the mainstream approach especially for biologists, but of course not the only one. See Perlman (2004) for a comprehensive review of the contemporary debate on teleology, which analyses the evolutionary approach in a wider context of teleological perspectives. The organisational approach, in our view, can provide a further option, and, we will argue, a naturalistic grounding of teleology that does not incur the limitations of the evolutionary and other approaches, such as the cybernetic one.
We are aware of the fact that it is quite unusual to claim that lineages have goals. Yet, we maintain that the appeal to the evolutionary loop between effects and existence to explain teleology implies that the system in which such a loop is realised is the lineage. This claim would deserve a more detailed examination, that we leave for a future work.
The evolutionary framework is also at the basis of the mainstream approach in the philosophical debate about biological functions, i.e. the so-called selected effect theory (Millikan 1989; Godfrey-Smith 1994). By interpreting Wright’s etiological account (Wright 1973) in evolutionary terms, the evolutionary framework defines functions as adaptations.
Claude Bernard’s work is neither the only nor the first contribution to a scientific grounding of teleological properties of living systems in the nineteenth century, especially if we take into consideration German Biology (see Lenoir 1981, 1982, for more details). Yet, Bernard’s work is crucial for the purposes of this paper inasmuch as it played an important role in the early development of the idea of biological self-determination by influencing the traditions of research of French Molecular Biology, Cybernetics, and that branch of Systems Theory which gave rise to the idea of biological autonomy.
For the historical relationship between Cybernetics and French molecular biology, see Fox Keller (2002).
We can find here a convergence of genetics, Bernard’s theory and cybernetic modelling. The genome evolves in such a way as to provide not only the mechanisms for the construction of structure, but also cybernetic mechanisms for the conservation and stabilisation of the internal milieu of individual living systems (see for example Morange 1994, p. 163). In such a way, the teleological dimensions of adaptation and adaptivity are integrated in a unique framework.
In the following section, we will discuss in some details the conceptual relations between biological organisation and physical self-organisation.
As we will discuss in the Sect. 3, it is important not to confuse the water cycle, to which we are referring here (the hydrologic system alone), with supra-organismal systems such as ecosystems, or with even more comprehensive climatic systems which possibly include biological organisms as components.
Rosen uses and re-interprets Aristotelian causes as a way of answering the question “why x?” in a description of a natural system, where x is a component or feature of such a system. Rosen does so in terms of physical, chemical and biological descriptions, by interpreting Aristotelian causes in strict relation to mathematical formalism and associating them with physical structures or quantities. In the case of the dynamical description of physical systems, he associates the initial state of a system with the material cause, the parameters with formal cause and the operators with efficient cause (Rosen 1985b). According to Rosen, in the dynamical descriptions of physics there is no space for final causes. When he applies the Aristotelian account in a relational description of biological systems, such as the one he develops for (M,R)-Systems (Rosen 1972, 1991), he identifies: the material cause with matter and energy flowing in the system (the input and the output of a process); the efficient cause with a material structure that affects the process without being directly affected in turn, which he expresses mathematically as a mapping that transforms the input into the output; the formal cause with the global topology of the network, that is, in mathematical terms, the whole graph built on the category formalism. As we discuss below, he characterises final causation with the inverse of efficient causation.
It could also be a membrane channelling the passage of molecules inside a cell, the heart pumping blood, etc.
Rosen relies on category theory in order to formally describe efficient causes as mappings. Indeed, category theory allows expressing the activity of components as mappings and, at the same time, mappings themselves as the products of other mappings. This adequately captures the hierarchical and manifold character of efficient causes in living systems: they act on processes (enzymes catalyse reactions) and, at the same time, they are produced by other efficient causes (enzymes are produced by other metabolic processes within the cell).
Let us consider the previous example of the catalyst as an instance of efficient cause. A minimal case of closure to efficient causation would be a system which produces all the catalysts necessary for its own activity (Cornish-Bowden 2006). This is what is usually called “catalytic closure” (Kauffman 2000).
Their local conservation makes the conceptual difference with respect to material causes. For instance, while the substrates of a chemical reactions are converted into the products, the catalysts accelerate the reactions without being consumed by it. Because of their conservation, cataysts are constraints, while substrates are material causes. See Mossio et al. (2013) for an account of constraints and their role in organisational closure.
Biological self-determination should be carefully distinguished from self-organisation. As mentioned, ‘self-organisation’ refers nowadays to physical spontaneous phenomena. In contrast, biological systems are (mostly) not spontaneous, in spite of the fact that they generate their own components. Accordingly, to avoid ambiguities, we submit that closure entails a form of self-maintenance of the whole, and not its self-generation or self-organisation.
These two levels of causation are of course not the only ones which coexist in biological systems. These usually realise many levels of organisation (unicellular, multicellular...), and possess also regulatory capacities. The point here is that biological organisation as a form of self-constraint requires, necessarily, a distinction between these two specific regimes.
Or, at least, in systems being “at the edge” of the biological domain as, possibly, complex chemical networks. In this paper, we do not discuss these categories of systems to the extent that this does not interfere with our main argument.
We cannot exclude a-priori that there might be cases of physicochemical (proto-biological) systems realising closure and, therefore, a basic form of intrinsic teleology. However, it should be underscored that this issue does not concern exclusively the organisational account. According to Bedau (1991), for instance, some kinds of crystals might undergo a process of natural selection, insofar as they are capable, in some adequate circumstances, of reproduction, variation and heredity. Accordingly, they would be teleological from an evolutionary perspective. As such, hence, the fact that the organisational account might possibly ascribe teleology to some physical systems does not constitute a principled difference (or weakness) with respect to the evolutionary one.
Therefore, we deal here with physicochemical regimes which would not be “supra-organismal”, as the already mentioned ecosystems or (possibly) larger climate systems.
“A candle flame [...] makes several active contributions to its own persistence. It maintains above combustion threshold temperature. It vaporises wax into a continuing supply of fuel. In a standard atmosphere and gravitational field, it induces convection, which pulls in continuing oxygen and removes combustion products. A candle flame, in other words, tends to maintain itself; it exhibits self-maintenance” (Bickhard 2000, http://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/autfuncrep.html.
A similar thesis has been proposed by Bishop (2008) in terms of direct self-constraint interpreted as a form of downward causation.
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Acknowledgments
This work was funded by Ministerio de Ciencia y Innovación, Spain (‘Juan de la Cierva’ program to LB); Research Project of the Spanish Government (FFI2011-25665 to LB) and by the Basque Government (IT 590-13, postdoctoral fellowship to LB).
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Mossio, M., Bich, L. What makes biological organisation teleological?. Synthese 194, 1089–1114 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0594-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0594-z